Like prostitution, BDSM activities are illegal in many jurisdictions despite being practiced by consenting adults…ignorance of both…is epidemic among the general public, and the media delights in perpetuating insulting and ridiculous stereotypes of both which tend to reinforce both public prejudice and official persecution. And neofeminists intentionally mischaracterize both as “abuse” or “violations of women’s rights” and deny that adult women have the right to choose either. But BDSM is abuse, isn’t it? For a man to beat a woman or tie her up or force her to have sex is wrong and illegal, isn’t it? Of course, unless that’s what she wants! Pushing a person out of an airplane constitutes murder, yet many people jump out of airplanes of their own free will every day.

The magic wand which transforms abuse into rough sex is consent, and thereby hangs the tale; if there are no witnesses or documentation to the consent, it can later be revoked by an emotionally unstable woman (as described in my columns of October 27th, 2010 and March 4th, 2011), with dire consequences for the hapless dominant. Furthermore, radical feminists claim that consent given while impaired or under duress isn’t valid consent, and that it’s the man’s responsibility to divine (with the super powers of his “male gaze”, no doubt) whether she is competent or be instantly transformed into a “rapist” even if his judgment is equally impaired. Neofeminists infantilize women still further by claiming that because of “patriarchal hegemonic norms”, women are not truly able to give consent to any kind of sex of which neofeminists disapprove, such as BDSM or prostitution or, in the case of rabid lunatics like Sheila Jeffreys, any heterosexual activity at all. This is the “philosophical” basis of both the Swedish Model and neofeminist opposition to porn.

There are, however, cases in which the inability of someone to give consent should be apparent to any reasonable person, and judging only by the statements in this September 9thHuffington Post article, this would at first seem like one of them:

[On August 27th] a northeast Alabama couple [was] arrested for allegedly torturing and sexually abusing a mentally disabled woman who was…found naked and handcuffed to a bed. Maurice Rex Johnson, 52, and Toni Renea Johnson, 40, have been charged with sodomy, sexual torture and unlawful imprisonment…[for] abusing a 23-year-old woman with profound mental disabilities inside their Attalla home for months, according to police…”[The victim’s] boyfriend, who is somewhat mentally challenged himself, found her,” Gadsden Police Capt. Regina May told The Huffington Post. “She was laying on the floor nude. They had shaved her head and handcuffed her to a bedframe and left her.” The young woman’s boyfriend was unable to free her, so he ran for help. Neighbors who responded contacted police, and members of the Gadsden Fire Department were called in to cut the woman free of the handcuffs.

Investigators have not yet said how the Johnsons may have come to know the victim. “When she was rescued, she made a statement to the officers that she had been cuffed to the bed like that because she had been bad,” May said. “She had suffered episodes of abuse, episodes of sodomy and sexual torture.” The Johnsons also allegedly put hot sauce on the victim’s genitals and prevented her from using a shower to alleviate the pain, police said…”She wasn’t being held captive all the time,” May said. “She functions on about the level of a 10-year-old. She has no family, no guardian. She was just kind of taken in by these people.” Investigators contacted the Alabama Department of Human Resources and discovered the victim had been in the DHR system for the majority of her life. She was released from the department’s care when she turned 21.

After rescuing the victim from the Johnson residence, police located the couple nearby and questioned them…Maurice Johnson was then arrested for possession of marijuana, and his wife was held on an outstanding warrant for resisting arrest and obstructing governmental operations in an unrelated case. While investigators worked to obtain arrest warrants against the couple for…[the abuse], Maurice Johnson posted bail for the drug charge and fled the area…On Wednesday, he was captured…at the home of his father…The victim…has since been placed with temporary caregivers. “It’s a horrible case,” May said. “Hopefully she’ll get back in the DHR system, and they’ll appoint a permanent guardian to look out for her best interests.”

The problem, of course, is that because of anti-BDSM bias in the police and media we can’t be sure how much of this is true. Police also described the woman in the Bagley case as “mentally deficient” despite witness claims to the contrary, and a follow-up article on the Hopkins case revealed a number of salient facts which were completely omitted in the original story. If the woman is as retarded as this article claims, it should have been readily apparent to the Johnsons and their actions thus did constitute abuse. However, I won’t be at all surprised if a DHR report declaring her competent surfaces. If she’s competent to live on her own she’s competent to consent to sex, and if she’s not competent why did DHR emancipate her at 21? The state cannot have its cake and eat it, too; if the Johnsons are found guilty the DHR is also culpable for abandoning its duty to someone who cannot care for herself, and if state doctors considered her competent how are non-psychologists supposed to tell she isn’t?

There’s a postscript to the story; take a look at the comments which follow it on Huffington Post. In a case like this, one expects the mob to believe whatever they read and react like villagers with torches, and there’s certainly a great deal of that there. But it goes far beyond that; a plethora of ugly Yankee stereotypes about Southerners are trotted out, plus dozens of childish comments about the mug shots making them look “inbred” or “genetically defective” (actually, they look like typical mugshots of fairly typical middle-aged people). And though as you can see the story is apolitical, that doesn’t stop dozens of soi-disant “liberals” from making moronic “red state” comments and, most astonishing of all, not one but several blaming the “Tea Party” for the incident. I am not making this up; I only wish I were. The alleged victim in the story is said to be unable to give consent due to “profound mental disabilities”, but it’s clear that many of those who commented on the story, and are no doubt presumed legally competent, could be described in exactly the same way.

31 Responses

I’m sure that if this story is reported on a purportedly “conservative” website, there will be plenty of posters saying that it’s obviously the fault of lefty-liberal-socialist-Obama-worshiping-commie-progressives. Which doesn’t make such nonsense OK when conservatives are the target, of course; it’s stupid either way. Just wanted to put it out there.

The couple do look sort of defective in those pics, but that’s because mug shots are not flattering. I’m not sure anybody’s looked good in a mug shot since Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia.

If DHR put out on her own a woman who “functions on about the level of a 10-year-old” and who has “no family, no guardian,” then somebody at DHR is at fault… or somebody who makes DHR’s rules is. There seems to be some assumption that it’s because they’ve had budget cuts, and this is where all the “it’s the Tea Party’s fault!” stuff is coming from. But like the rest of this story, we need to wait until we have the facts before we start assigning blame. To the Tea Party or anybody else.

Well, there is one difference; I’ve never seen so-called “conservatives” responding to such stories by stating that everyone in “blue states” (Goddess, that terminology is stupid!) are inbred perverts.

As a Northerner by background now living in (just barely) the South, I can say that a big part of the reason why Northerners have such anti-Southern bigotry is that in general, Northerners know much less about the South than Southerners know about the North. This is because most national news media and major entertainment conglomerates are based in the North and run by Northerners, and they portray the South less frequently and very stereotypically. So a lot of Northerners think the South is really like that.

Maggie, you have a picture from the movie “Deliverance” on this blog post; many Northerners take that movie completely seriously as a realistic portrayal of normal Southerners.

While I don’t doubt what you say, Marla, I am still unbelievably offended by this attitude towards Southerners. The civil war (the war of northern aggression) was so long ago – get over it!

I had several clients in Georgia and would travel there a few times a year. I was always treated with warmth and kindness. Everyone had a great sense of humor, even supplying a dictionary of terms for “Yankees” who were not familiar with local language.

This was in great contrast with my trip to Washington DC. The people there were in my experience, cold, unhelpful and far more racist than anyone I ever encountered in the south. While I enjoyed the museums and the history, I was glad to be far away from the overall snarky, sarcastic nastiness of the general population. i think the only exception was my very funny taxi driver who talked my ear off about the Persian king Xerxes.

The greatest peculiarity of that is, Washington is actually in the traditional South (the Mason-Dixon line is the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland). But since so many Yankees of necessity settled in the city, it became a mixture of (as Sailor B’s Kennedy quote reminds us) the worst characteristics of both regions and none of the respect for individuality and faith in self-reliance which characterized the faraway West. 😦

Yup. I was born and raised in the North (Chicago), but my family is still very firmly situated in our Southern heritage. I’m among the first generation who has been wholly raised in the North, never living in the South for long stretches of time like my parents did. And in the North, see, we’re not supposed to have pride in our Southern heritage. Especially if we’re brown-skinned then it’s a baffled (but WHY?!); of course proud, white Southerners are immediately demonized as being racist. Please. Then there are those in the North who try their best to hide their Southern roots…until discussion of food comes up then the secret is out!

Marla,
I worked with a guy from Waco. (He was a computer salesman and I was a tech.) He told me the difference between a Yankee and a Damned Yankee.

A Yankee was someone born north of the Mason Dixon line. A Damned Yankee was one who crossed it.

He was a funny guy. Before his computer gig, he worked in the oil fields during the boom time in the early 80’s. Before that, he was viola player in one of the Philharmonics in Texas.

He loved to party, so every Monday morning he’d come in all hungover. I’d never actually seen someone wince when addressed in a normal tone of voice until I met him. All I can figure is that it had to be a whole lot of fun to pay that high a price come Monday morning.

Exactly, and so the arbitrary decision of some ignorant and unknown television network graphic designer has now become a stupid and annoying feature of American slang. It’s not quite as irritating as the usage of words like “bad”, “sick” or “outrageous” to mean “good”, but it’s close.

The networks traditionally assigned blue to the party in power and red to the challengers. That is, in 1992, GHW Bush was blue and Clinton was red. In 1996 and 2000, the Democrats were blue. IIRC, it was after the 2000 election that analysts started making a big deal of how the red-blue maps showed a split between large cities and the rest of the country (if you ignored the 49% that voted the other way in most of those areas). And that froze the Democrats-blue, Republicans-red coding in the public mind. (And saved the networks from assigning red to Obama in 2008!)

Maggie wrote: “The state cannot have its cake and eat it, too; if the Johnsons are found guilty the DHR is also culpable for abandoning its duty to someone who cannot care for herself, and if state doctors considered her competent how are non-psychologists supposed to tell she isn’t?”

Alabama will have to do some fancy footwork to rationalize first declaring a woman competent at 21 and then declaring her incompetent at 23. I wonder if the state-employed doctor(s) who declared the woman competent will suffer any consequences for turning a mental 10-year-old out to survive on her own.

If she is incompetent, which she may not be. Cops believe their super cop powers give them enough knowledge to speak authoritatively in many professional fields they have neither studied nor worked in, including (but not limited to) medicine, psychology, pharmacology, law, sociology, civil engineering and sex work.

Yeah, I know too many cops to ever believe that as a group they know anything about sex, let alone sex work.

The issues surrounding sex with someone that may be considered incompetent are quite difficult. I know that in my college days (sadly they are 20 years behind me now) I was terrified of having sex with a woman who was impaired. I don’t know if it was wildly low self esteem or just an overactive imagination, but I had a horrible fear of being seen as a sexual predator if I had what I thought was consensual sex with a woman who turned around later and said I “took advantage” of her inebriated mind. Though I’m married and monogamous now,I do think that if I were to be thrust back into the dating pool, those fears would stick with me.

A few years ago, when I managed a store that sold sex toys, lingerie and swimwear I got a furious phone call from a woman who told me her 18 year old son who was mentally challenged got a business card from a woman who was in my store and that her son paid this woman a visit. The woman in question (we’ll call her Irma) was and still is a prostitute in my area. This mother thought my store was allowing or even encouraging solicitation by Irma (and probably others in her mind) and that I was somehow profiting from it. This was not the case. I knew Irma, and the next time I saw her I had a very uncomfortable conversation with her. I explained to her what I’d been told and that while I didn’t have an issue with her business or with her, that I’m certain my bosses would, and I did not need the local police stopping by to see me. She claimed that the young man was there with several of his friends (and they would have all been over 18 as we carded people when they entered the store) and that he approached her and that she thought he was aware of who she was (she did advertise in some of the local free papers and still does, actually) and she gave him a card and that he showed up a few days later. The young man’s mother had told me that her son had charged over $6000 on her credit card (that he was authorized to use), and Irma claimed that she never realized he was mentally challenged. She also agreed not to solicit in my store.

I never met the young legally adult man with mental challenges myself, so I can’t give any opinion on his competency, and even if I could I’m not educated properly enough to determine that he possessed the proper mental capacity to recognize that pussy…even GREAT pussy, probably isn’t worth $6K (at least not for a single session). But I had a REAL pissed off mom on the phone who threatened repeatedly to call the police. Now, at the time I managed the store I’d already worked for the local courthouse over 6 years…and I could not come up with anything I could be charged for or held legally liable for and I explained to her as calmly as possible that I had done nothing wrong. Eventually (and it took about 45 minutes of me laying on all the charm that Japanese monster can) I did get her to concede that I could NOT be responsible.

But she said something to me in that phone call that has always stuck with me. She told me that while her son did not possess the same mental capacity as virtually every other man his age, he did still possess the same sex drive. Which always made me think the only real victim in this scenario was the mother. In particular, her wallet. Now, the anger this woman was directing at me came from another place. She clearly felt that her son had been taken advantage of and she thought I was one of the parties that had done so. Once she realized that I was not and that I empathized with her, I allowed her to get out her frustration. She purged a little on me, but it was fine. I’m sure she felt better, and I felt like I helped her out, just a little bit.

Because of that conversation, this case makes me very sad. If this young woman was brutalized against her will, I feel very sorry for her and it makes me very angry with the Johnsons. If everything that happened to her was consensual…well now we have 3 potential victims, not one. Lots of people like BDSM. I’m sure some of them don’t have the capacity to express it as poetically as Pauline Reage. But they know they like the sting of the flogger, or the feeling of helplessness from a well tight knot, or the humiliation of a “forced” head shaving. But a lot of people don’t want to acknowledge that. Even if they are okay with a fully mentally functioning adult accepting BDSM, they want to treat the mentally challenged as innocent, childlike, sexless. And that’s not fair to anyone. Part of it is the language we use. If we describe the mentally challenged as having the “mind of a X year old” we are not doing them a service, because they DON’T have the mind of an “X year old”. They have some of the cognitive capacity of that age in some respects. So instead we get some unusual and uncommon cases like this one where the truth may never really be known. I hope she’s found competent. I hope she then admits to being a willing participant. But I fear that isn’t the case.

I’m with you; as I said it my column on the Bagleys, I think they exercised poor judgment and failed to “cover their arses”. Though people with mental disabilities need sex too, it’s not a good idea in the current political climate for any normal person to get involved with them no matter how much they may want it.

When I was 9 or 10 I visited a home for mentally retarded adults where my friend’s mother worked. There was a male bus driver who drove the younger residents to wherever they went to school. A young woman I’ll call Jean, about 20 years old, threw a hysterical screaming fit, and I heard an employee say that Jean had told the male bus driver she had a crush on him, and he rejected her.

Jean was a 20 year old with the cognitive abilities of a 10 year old, but she had an adult sex drive, and she was just as hurt and upset by romantic rejection and sexual frustration as any other adult would be.

I think of Jean whenever I hear or read a news story about someone being investigated or arrested for having sex with a mentally retarded adult. Are people like Jean not allowed to have sex?

In the U.S. and U.K., no. Sex in those countries is viewed as a luxury rather than a basic human need, and the moralists seem to believe that it’s something that has to be learned even though every animal in nature can manage it despite being far less intelligent than a human ten-year-old.

I understand your point, but I’m not sure what ability to consent or BDSM has to do with this case. It says they were “abusing a 23-year-old woman with profound mental disabilities inside their Attalla home for months” I don’t know a lot about BDSM but even if she had a 250 IQ and the mental age of a Elder God, that would still be abuse. I haven’t read anything in the story that could be understood as if all was just one BDSM session gone wrong. It just looks like your standard “pair of sadistic psychopaths kidnap a weak person and abuse him o her till they are discovered” story.

Anyway, a 10 years old mental age is not thaaaat bad. If a remember correctly thats light or mild mental retardation (Not profund, thats a 4-5 years old mental age I think), they occasionaly need some assistance but they are generaly competent enough to live without constant supervision. I don’t know how it is done in America, but “competence” is not usually understood as a yes/no thing, it has its greys. Being abused for months is probably one of those events they (well, everybody probably) are not competent enough to assimilate so I guess it makes sense they want her to get back to the DHR system (more so if, as it says, she has no family).

P.S: I’m assuming the journalist didn’t exagerate or lie to make the story more shocking or dramatic.

Because you don’t know much about BDSM, you probably don’t realize that some people consent to activities much more extreme than what was described in this article (and as you said, even that may be exaggerated). So no, it’s NOT abuse if she consented and is competent to give that consent. If I said that “a man held my friend’s arm down and tortured her repeatedly with an electrically-charged needle, drawing blood until she cried and injecting ink under her skin, marking her permanently with a brand and resulting in bruises that lasted for a week” that sounds pretty horrible, but if I said “my friend got herself another tattoo” that sort of changes things, doesn’t it?

So no, it’s NOT “still abuse” if she competently consented. I would never consent to get my head shaved or have hot sauce poured on my pussy, but neither would I get a tattoo or have my nipples pierced or put nasty white powder up my nose or jump out of a perfectly good airplane. Competent adults have the right to choose to do (or have done to themselves) whatever they want, even if others think it’s disgusting or freaky or abusive or stupid or wrong. So the ONLY issues involved in this story are A) Did she consent to the activities? and B) Is she competent to make adult decisions?

Naveen, you seem to be saying that “just one BDSM session gone wrong” is not abuse, but if it goes on for months, then it’s automatically abuse.

Long term or permanent consensual adult relationships that involve BDSM do exist. For some people it’s just an occasional thing to spice up their sex life and add variety, but for others it’s a standard part of their personal life, that may extend to non-sexual dominant/submissive interactions as well.

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